My girlfriend had her laptop stolen last week. She's now got a new one and I have been trying to retrieve files backed up on an external USB hard drive using Nero BackItUp 2. Her 40GB hard disk was backed up as a drive (not as individual files and directories) as it was the primary partition. Her new laptop has a 80GB HD and i don' t want to re-partition her new hard drive (deleting windows etc) to restore her old data. So what I have done is copy the backup files to her c: drive (there are 14x 2GB .dat files) with the aim of restoring them to a new partition on the external HD which i have reformatted. I then hope to copy back the files she actually needs to her new C drive rather than the whole operating system etc. I have created the bootable Restore CD in Nero and have gone through the process as detailed in the Nero Backitup user guide. I boot the PC from the Nero Restore CD and locate the back up files on her c: drive and then select the destination drive as the new partition on the External HD (which i have created as 40GB - the same size as the old HD). The process appears to start but after about 2 seconds i get a message saying the program "has performed an illegal memory access and will be shut down". It then crashes out of the restore program and I have to reboot. I've tried various times with and without trying to create a Master Boot Record (as i don't need to boot from the restored partition, just access the files). Am I missing something obvious? Is it possible to restore to a primary partition on a USB hard drive rather than an internal HD? Is there any other way at getting at this backed up data? An information would be great as she really needs the data on her backup (and if she's happy i'm happy )! Here are some specs if that helps: New laptop - Toshiba Satellite A110 - 179 XP Home SP2 1GB DDR2 RAM 80GB HD External HD - Iomega LDHD250 - U 250GB - Primary Partition 40GB (empty) Thanks a lot
Hi people I'm still trying to work this one out - shame no one has any ideas! I've tried the whole restore process using a different PC (with the backed up files on a separate partition on the external HD) but still get the illegal memory access message. I guess the problem is trying to restore to a partition in an external hard drive via USB. Any other ideas would be great if anyone has any! Thanks
You do not want to restore the full partition but only to recover certain files from the image. With the imaging software I use (Drive Backup, Drive Image) is possible to "explore" the image and recover particular files, without restoring it. This would be a solution - if BackItUp allows this operation, as it should.
Thanks for the suggestion zapatero but backitup doesn't seem to offer this function. I guess using one of the other programs you suggest wouldn't work on these files or would they?
